1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke.

1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke.

My feelings regarding form over content and the Tragedy of HTML are in agreement with Abigail's long-standing manifesto cited above. The CERN/TB-L view of the WWW was ruined by the introduction of Marketing-style graphic design. However, when the data is rich enough, graphics and even color graphics are appropriate. See Bertin and/or Tufte.
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(Note that conformant to dogma, these areemtags not i tags!)
Abigail's manifesto is upheld perfectly, since not only was the data rich enough to grpah, the article showed the code but didn't link the graphic.

system()ing out to gnuplot is fine for those who have it and are comfortable with it. I recall doing stereograms with Unix V7 plot and a daiseywheel terminal, it works, but I've not played much with gnuplot. The example is even readably self-documenting as an embedded here-doc, I like that. (I may be over-sensitized on that; Uri was sounding off on readability last night in his Boston.PM rehearsal of his YAPC talk.) Hiding the system() in a open("|gnuplot") that demos 5.6's autoviv FDs is even cooler.

In spirit of TMTOWTDI and CUFP, I rather like Stein's GD.pm and Verbruggen's GD::Graph wrapper for Boutell's libgd. Latest revs support TrueColor as well as palettized, and both PNG and JPeG (GIF is gone). I see there's even now a Template::Plugin::GD::Graph in the Template-Toolkit, which could be interesting for on-the-fly graphics (which I try to avoid, but could be useful if the data xor users are dynamic).

Cheers,
-- Bill N1VUXIf I post a few more times I should register, eh?

I hate blinking text, text-in-gifs and 30 seconds flash introductions with a vengence.

I like my code syntax highlighted, as it adds another dimension, and allows the computer to do much of the work of ensuring I close my quotes, don't misspell my keywords, highlights variables that have only been seen once (usually typos) etc. That's what computers are for.

As you say, when the graphic incorporates information not style, it is a definite plus.

Oh go on with you..... it doesn't hurt! Join already.

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -Richard Buckminster Fuller

[...] You can put a '+' in front of the '>' or '<' to indicate you want both read and write access to the file; thus '+<' is almost always preferred for read/write updates--the '+>' mode would clobber the file first.

It doesn't. I never claimed it will. The data file I use,
I originally seeded by hand.

If I have given the suggestion the code I posted is something
you can just download and run everywhere, I've given the
wrong impression. I just posted code that runs daily on my
system, and that was developped purely to run on my system.
It was posted mainly for educational and illustrational purposes.
It should run on many systems, but some assembly will be required.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other